The Handbook of Critical Environmental Accountability and Sustainability broadens our understanding of how business and the natural environment interact, assessing how market and trading mechanisms can be used to manage this significant relationship. It highlights international perspectives on sustainability as well as the varied applications of environmental accounting theory.
Expert authors explore topics including the limits of growth, cultural associations and nature, feminist theorising, and the role sport plays in diverse cultures. They provide in-depth critical analysis of dominant theories shaping environmental accounting and examine recent work on the connections between environmental and social imaginaries. Chapters shed light on hermeneutics, interpretivism and critical theory to reveal natures meaning in current debates, using an economic and financial lens to define corporate social responsibility and underline the importance of climate action to meet the Sustainable Development Goals.
This Handbook is an essential resource for scholars and students of environmental accounting and management, as well as business and environmental studies. It is also a beneficial read for general environmental theorists in business, government and education due to its discussion of the interplay between accounting, environmental accountability and governance.
Arvustused
Glen Lehman and Renée Palmers Handbook of Critical Environmental Accountability and Sustainability is a timely addition to our ever-dwindling research resources, offering alternate perspectives. The book explores various variables that impact accountability and its financial management the interpretivist perspective that guides it helps combine and understand the multifaceted, complex systems that shape the basic institutions of liberal democracies. Accountants, accountability theorists, and researchers from fields as diverse as medicine and public health are provided with a range of different viewpoints that will guide our thinking for years to come. -- David David, University of Adelaide, South Australia In the contemporary world, accounting, accountability, environmentalism, and social responsibility are all too often used in a rhetorical way, and good life remains elusive. We need to rethink the concepts. This magnus opus excavates philosophical foundations of the debates to nurture possibilities of emancipatory change. It should be essential reading for scholars, regulators, practitioners, and legislators. -- Lord Prem Sikka, Member of UK House of Lords, UK This Handbook of Critical Environmental Accountability and Sustainability presents a range of reform accountability arguments to advance environmental accounting. The contributors share a view that new practices are needed to combat the increasing levels of environmental and social decay. New ideas from the philosophy of social imaginaries is a key feature of the book in creating an appreciation of the forces and ideas that have shaped the current directions that create climate change, unsustainability and injustice. -- David Parker, Henley Business School, UK In the last four decades, environmental accountability research has thrived thanks to the contributors to this Handbook. Glen and Renée masterfully consolidate the fields diverse insights and rich history, offering a robust theoretical platform for future research. Inquisitive, radical, and profoundly intellectual, this work elevates the field to its finest. -- Max Baker, The University of Sydney, Australia How can we deal with the challenges that climate change, the destruction of species, the depletion of resources, the unjust distribution of resources within the present and between the present and the future? We live in a world in which companies are addicted to profit making and governments focus on short term issues; yet we are faced with disastrous climate change and colossal unfairness. Glen Lehman and his colleagues deal with such crucial issues through the lens of reformed accounting practices. They test a number of philosophical and social approaches to see whether they can provide insights into how to proceed in dealing with massive and enduring problems which require the systematic restructuring of governments and companies. -- George Couvalis, Flinders University, Australia
Contents
Foreword: accountability, philosophy and the natural environment xvi
Introduction to the Handbook of Critical Environmental Accountability and
Sustainability 1
PART I EARLY ACCOUNTABILITY AND SUSTAINABILITY RESEARCH
1 Early work in environmental accounting 12
Renée Palmer, Gordon Boyce and Glen Lehman
2 Background and global context 25
Gordon Boyce, Renée Palmer and Glen Lehman
3 Global and international perspectives on sustainability 45
Renée Palmer, Gordon Boyce and Glen Lehman
4 Extending accounting through John Rawlss political liberalism to the
natural environment 58
Renée Palmer, Gordon Boyce and Glen Lehman
5 Early critical theory work on environmental accounting: environmental
accounting as instrumental or emancipatory discourse 74
Renée Palmer, Gordon Boyce and Glen Lehman
6 Legal aspects of environmental accounting: the greening of accounts 99
Fraser Bell, Renée Palmer and Gordon Boyce
7 From the Brundtland Report to the Global Reporting Initiative 115
Renée Palmer, Gordon Boyce and Glen Lehman
8 Accountability, sustainability and the art of interpretation 131
Glen Lehman
PART II THEORETICAL APPROACHES FOR ENVIRONMENTAL
ACCOUNTING, ACCOUNTABILITY AND GOVERNANCE
9 Evaluating the integrated thinking research journey 147
Dusan Ecim and Warren Maroun
10 Corporate socio-economic activity and sustainability: towards a working
model considering finance, governance and accounting together 162
Michel Aglietta, Nihel Chabrak, Jim Haslam and Jacques Richard
11 Critical theory, environmental accounting frameworks, the business case,
global sustainable reporting 181
Andrea Brunt, Glen Lehman and Renée Palmer
12 Interpretive perspectives on the business case and neoliberal accounting
199
Renée Palmer, Andrea Brunt and Glen Lehman
13 iek, environment, crisis, governance (and accounting) 217
Mengyuan Feng and Jim Haslam
14 Accounting, nature and the common good 222
Sheila Killian and Philip ORegan
15 Accountability, closeness and environmental transparency 232
Renée Palmer, Andrea Brunt and Glen Lehman
16 Environmental accounting: accounting as instrumental or emancipatory
discourse 248
Renée Palmer, Andrea Brunt and Glen Lehman
17 Understanding depth experiences: fullness and dearth as a prelude
to moving from closed-world thinking to open-world environmental
accounting 264
Renée Palmer, Andrea Brunt and Glen Lehman
18 Accounting, secularity and the natural environment: accounting for a
disenchanted world 291
Rénee Palmer, Andrea Brunt and Glen Lehman
19 Accounting and environmentalism: developing a schema to appreciate
academic research about the needed impact 317
Jim Haslam, Lina Kloviene and Marie-Theresa Speziale
20 Reclaiming the public sphere: possibilities and problems for corporate
social and environmental accounting 336
Glen Lehman
21 Conclusions: global accountability, sustainability research prospects
359
Glen Lehman
PART III APPLYING ENVIRONMENTAL ACCOUNTING THEORY
22 Tax, society and the environment 371
Jawad Harb and Elizabeth Morton
23 Management accounting and sustainability 378
Venkateshwaran Narayanan
24 The social dimension of sustainability: the role of accounts in making
well-being visible 387
25 Gender and the accountability agenda in the Sustainable Development
Goals: non-inclusive accounting of female invisible farmers or producers
406
Yvonne Corcoran-Nantes
26 Asbestos and environmental issues 421
Lee Moerman and Sandra van der Laan
27 Silent, shadow and counter accounting 426
Gordon Boyce
28 Counter accounting 441
Helen Tregidga, Michelle Rodrigue and Matias Laine
29 Accountings great retreat: decline of the public sphere and the malaise
of
reform accounting 450
Glen Lehman
PART IV EXTINCTION ACCOUNTING
30 Environment: the importance of accounting biodiversity 474
Michael John Jones
31 A tiger cub in Berkeley Square: a utop(dystop?)-ian account of rewilding
and de-extinction 481
Jill Frances Atkins and Barry Atkins
32 Assessing the potential of the Biological Diversity Protocol to expand
the
accounting discourse within the mining sector of Madagascar 486
Gareth Chapman
33 Integrating rewilding and de-extinction into the extinction accounting
framework 511
Jill Frances Atkins and Warren Maroun
34 Emotion and compassion as a KPI in the extinction accounting framework:
compassionate rewilding as a core conservation element 523
Mira Lieberman
PART V PLANETARY BOUNDARIES, COSMIC ORDERS AND SOCIAL
IMAGINARIES
35 Social imaginaries, part I: global social imaginaries the background
545
Glen Lehman
36 Some social imaginaries, part II: for environmental accounting
situating
the social imaginary in a tentative pedagogic categorisation 558
Glen Lehman and Renée Palmer
37 Social imaginaries, part III: from subversive to interpretivist
environmental imaginaries 571
GlenLehman, RenéePalmer and PatriciaWalford
38 Social imaginaries: critical imaginaries and Habermas-inspired
environmental accounting 589
Glen Lehman, Renée Palmer and Patricia Walford
39 Deflationary realism: social imaginaries, evaluative frameworks and the
natural environment 606
Glen Lehman, Renée Palmer and Patricia Walford
40 Social imaginaries in a transnational environment 631
Glen Lehman and Patricia Walford
41 Social imaginaries, accounting, accountability and the role of the state
648
Glen Lehman and Patricia Walford
42 Conclusion to the Handbook of Critical Environmental Accountability and
Sustainability 670
Glen Lehman
Index 673
Edited by Glen Lehman, UniSA Business School, University of South Australia and Renée Palmer, University of Adelaide, Australia
